


Maybe in a Dream

by marmota_b



Series: Painkiller [5]
Category: Highlander: The Series, Marvel, Punisher (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies), X-Men - All Media Types, Young Avengers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Friendship, Gen, Loki Redemption, Redemption, School
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-12-11
Packaged: 2018-05-01 05:04:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5193305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marmota_b/pseuds/marmota_b
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki was stripped of his access to magic and sent to school. Most people did not like the idea but could not think of anything better. Loki had decided anything would be better than isolation in Asgard's prisons. But there was more to Midgard than Asgardians had thought.<br/>Charles Xavier grudgingly admitted that Lachlan Blake did need his particular brand of help.<br/>Logan? Logan did not back away from challenges. Even if they involved Shakespeare, an annual festival of high school drama clubs, and the adopted son of the king of Asgard plus baggage.<br/>Then there were, among others, the twins from Arizona, the Young Avengers, and the man called Painkiller, more or less in that order.</p><p>It's not as if the world needed yet another Loki redemption story, is it? But there is an alternate universe that does need it. It needs redemption stories. It stands on redemption stories.<br/>Stories are powerful. And sometimes, you have to hope against hope that a particular story is more powerful than the others.<br/>Sometimes, you have to stand your ground and act it out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Coneycat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coneycat/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Condiments (The Morning After remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4229829) by [Transposable_Element](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transposable_Element/pseuds/Transposable_Element). 
  * Inspired by [The Morning After](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3370310) by [marmota_b](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marmota_b/pseuds/marmota_b). 



> Well, as I say in the summary, it's not as if the world needed another Loki redemption story. But once inspiration struck for various elements of such a story that I could not recall having seen elsewhere, there wasn't much else to do than sit down and start writing it. There's no arguing with a certain kind of inspiration.  
> It branched out. There's going to be a lot of characters involved, some of them but not the most my own.  
> All in all, I think I could blame the whole thing on C. S. Lewis, Martin Hilský, Kenneth Branagh and Tom Hiddleston. The first one in general and the other three for how keen on Shakespeare they are.

It was late in the evening. Darkness had closed around the wooden hall at the edge of a forest on Midgard. There were people young and old, and they were weary because there were more of the very young and the very old than there were of those in the fullness of strength. They had only just finished some of their tasks for the day. But the fire was crackling warm over dry wood and the bard’s voice was fresh.

The bard sang of heroes and gods, of their mighty deeds and daring quests.

The bard sang of the world-tree and its branches, of the weavers of fate.

The bard sang of the treachery of Loki Silvertongue, of howling wolves and dangerous serpents; of Loki tied to a stone, with poison dripping.

Hear, people, the wisdom of man, so that you may know the truth of life.

 

* * *

 

Heimdall saw, because Midgard was in the sphere of what he saw. Heimdall heard, because these people spoke and sung of Asgard and Heimdall listened to all that was told of Asgard everywhere.

Heimdall thought, and remembered, and told Odin and Frigga, who thought and remembered.

 

* * *

 

There were Ice Giants in Asgard and Heimdall had not seen them come, because someone had found paths between worlds that lay beyond the sphere of Heimdall’s seeing. That someone was Loki Silvertongue.

Later, he used those paths to go and have some final words with his brother on Midgard. He lied, a little. He told the truth, a little. Sometimes, a little bit of truth was better than lies. There was a power in telling the truth and shaping it towards the point you wanted to convey. Was this not exactly what Odin had done to him?

Sometimes, though, it could cut both ways. Sometimes, a little bit of truth was enough to awake an understanding.

Thor stood in the dusty street of a town in New Mexico, and regretted.

Thor stood on the Bifrost and did what he had to do, although it meant he was breaking his word together with the bridge.

Sometimes, people told lies and half-truths because the whole truth was too much. And Loki let go and fell.

 

* * *

 

There were many parts of the universe Heimdall could not see. There were many parts of the universe Loki had not known before.

Far too many of them were adverse to him. Even though neither Asgard nor Midgard knew of those places, they knew of Asgard and Midgard. There were whisperings. Stories.

And now Loki knew what the man he had called his father had thought and expected of him. Now he understood his “no”.

He starved; at first, for recognition and understanding, and in the end, he simply starved.

That was when _he_ found him.

He had heard the stories, too. He told Loki to embrace them.

 

* * *

 

There were serpentine things flying over the streets of New York City, destruction raining from the sky, and Loki stood above it with blue madness in his eyes and thrust a dagger into his brother’s side.

A woman in the streets of New York City frantically dialled her son’s phone number, thinking “no, no, no!” Later, she realised it was not what she had thought, but that did not make it all that better. Thankfully, her son was fine, just rather shaken.

A boy held his grandfather’s hand and screamed, in his mind, at the unfairness of the world, because with all that was going on outside, there was no one to come to take care of grandpa. And Grandpa should be out there, fighting the invaders, not in here, fighting his own body.

A girl considered screaming for real, for a while, and then she grabbed her bow and arrows, broke the window with a lamp that had short-fused earlier, and shot an alien in the face. In theory. In reality, she shot it in the neck with no particular effect, and then ran for her life and swore to get much better. About as good as the man who asked for her arrows later. Or better.

A boy kept murmuring “please don’t shoot us, please don’t shoot us,” and indeed, they did not.

Another boy tried to run away, somewhere, anywhere, and blew up the side of a building. In the general confusion, he was overlooked, but there were security cameras and it would come to bite him in the backside later.

Another girl grew a little that day; but her mother was there, too, fearing for her policeman boyfriend out in the streets, and the girl was afraid at least thrice over and very confused.

A man dressed in black fell down elsewhere in the streets, clutching his side, because a flash from an attacker’s energy weapon had grazed him. Moments later, he fired a retaliating shot from his handgun, his hands steadily belying the pain he felt. He quickly switched for a new magazine, checked that the group of unarmed civilians under his care was still unharmed, and not for the first time that day, he wished he had carried at least a rifle. But he had already learned to be good enough to make do with anything. He could have made do with rubble and broken glass in a pinch.

Six time zones away, a seemingly young man sat in a pub suddenly gone very quiet. His beer was forgotten as the latest news from New York played on the TV, replacing the football match that had been televised there before. If you’d have observed him very closely and carefully, you’d have realised that the look on his face was not so much an expression of shock as an expression of “well, that’s new.” But there was no one to observe him closely. He liked it that way.

Another man, who had bones covered in metal and claws hidden in his hands, marched into a study in upstate New York and shouted at the top of his lungs even before he reached his destination, “There are bloody aliens in New York! Aliens! Are we gonna do anything about that?!” This man, too, was older than he looked, and he had long before decided that nothing the world would throw at him could faze him. The world kept trying.

A brother and a sister in Arizona watched the news, eyes wide, on their neighbour’s television, where it had replaced a favourite movie. The glass in the boy’s hand cracked and then crumpled like putty. The fire on the gas stove flared up.

For a boy in Boston, it was a wrestling match that had been replaced by the news. He watched the news with growing amazement. That day, he found a new hero. He was big, green, protected his teammates, and punched a space whale in the face.

A man in Memphis decided he had definitely had too much to drink and it was high time to take that African girl up on her offer. He could use a change in scenery. Halfway to upstate New York, the fact that it had not been the drink finally hit home and he began to doubt the wisdom of his decision. But he had a thing for sticking to his decisions, once he made them, and went all the way. The girl welcomed him with a hug and said “Better to be all together in times like this. We’re planning on going to help with the aftermath. Can you go?” The man nodded numbly.

A girl on a joyride through the multiverse stopped to frown at a screen, and then stomped on the ground. Reality broke through into another reality. But the news had travelled slowly from Earth. When she arrived, most of it was over and the world had gone on, although it had changed.

A dying man saw the news, and decided that he should pass his legacy on before he died.

A girl in Illinois kept dreaming of hiding from aliens in the streets of New York, until one day, she woke up in the cellar.

A boy elsewhere in Illinois was assigned to read _Twelfth Night_ for school. At first, he decided to watch a movie version, but about twenty minutes in, he thought, “Weren’t all the women played by men then?” Thirty minutes in, he turned off the TV, found the discarded book and settled in to enjoy implications his teacher, who assigned Shakespeare largely on principle, had not entirely foreseen.

A group of girls in upstate New York decided to watch a new anime. Then, when certain things happened, they produced a scale of disgusted “ewww”s. A woman with white hair thrust her head into the room, saw the screen and asked, “Who gave you something like that to watch?” She was not all that surprised by the answer she got. Some people were, if not predictable, then certainly deductable.

A girl in Scotland read The Scottish Play for the first time in her life and did not understand half of it. Later, she told her guardian, almost howling with tears in her eyes, that she thought it was stupid, because Macbeth did not have to do any of it. Her guardian explained to her gently that that was why it was a tragedy.

 

* * *

 

It was late in the evening. In a partially wooden house at the edge of a forest on Midgard, a group of people, mostly young people, sat on benches around a table, singing with a guitar from a couple of songbooks, falling apart from many years of use and haphazardly shared between them. Some of them were still wearing the aprons they had needed earlier that day; because they worked in the kitchen adjacent to the dining room they sat in now and had only just finished their work for the day. The song, though played and sung rather inexpertly, had a haunting melody that cut deep into their hearts in the growing shadows.

Sitting to the side of the main group, there was a trio of men, two of whom did not sing. When the song ended, the one who had sung quietly translated the words for the other two.

 

_It is said that man collected the treasure of his wisdom_

_Stored it in his proverbs_

_And he who may want to know the truth of life_

_Let the treasure speak to him._

_But if you want to find illuminationthis way_

_Do not go half the journey._

_Try to listen to the whole story._

_Half a truth can also lie._

_He who prepares a pit for others will fall into it_

_He who deals with sword will die by it._

_But the truth is only then certain_

_When there’s not one half of it missing._

_So hear, you all, the second half_

_There is an eternal truth hidden in it:_

_He who rejects the sword will die on the cross._

_Hear, people, the wisdom of man._

 

As the words went on, the listeners’ faces took on very careful blank appearances and the speaker’s mouth quirked in a wry, knowing smile.

“It’s not easy to hear, is it?” he said when he finished.

He did not get an answer, but he did not need it.

He was very, very old, although he did not look like it.

 

* * *

 

Heimdall saw, because Midgard was in the sphere of what he saw. Seeing is not the same as knowing, though; for one thing, seeing is not hearing. This was, for reasons of prevention, not widely known, but when Heimdall wanted to listen, he had to focus. And a group of people singing at the edge of a forest in a small, insignificant country did not merit listening at that time, when there were no longer songs sung about Asgard and there were many things happening elsewhere that seemed more significant.

Heimdall saw, but he did not really think or remember, and he never told Odin.

If Heimdall saw and remembered, somewhere on the periphery of his seeing and remembering, that the man who had sat there on that evening, listening to a song, was the same man who, about a year before, had fought in the streets of New York City side by side with one of Prince Thor’s fellow warriors, and later that day had fallen down, grazed by a Chitauri weapon, and if Heimdall saw that about a year later, the man lay down on a roof dressed almost head to toe in black and shot the very same of Thor’s fellow warriors, he did not stop to remember where he had seen him before. What he did stop to think about, however, was when about a week later still, he saw the man in black and the man in blue, red and white shake hands and strike a deal. That did merit listening.

He could not really see or hear that throughout their deal, they kept in touch with the very, very old man who had translated the year before. The waves on which the Internet and phone calls travelled, though part of Midgard’s atmosphere, were not in the sphere of what Heimdall saw. The very old man remained insignificant, because he liked it that way.

The man in black and the man in blue, red and white met again and became friends. The man in black began to listen to the whole story. But that part happened later.

Asgard’s understanding of Midgard was only half the truth. Despite its many advantages over it, Asgard’s understanding of Midgard and its fates was a lie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song is "Balada velkopáteční" ("The Ballad of Good Friday") by Miloš Rejchrt as I know it from the youth songbook of my church. I translated it for content and feel rather than rhyme. I hoped it might be on YouTube, in some amateur video, but it doesn't seem so; you'll have to make do with the words.  
> The context for that particular scene is in ["Ceasefire".](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5202218)


	2. A Harebrained Idea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realised I should probably point out that for the purposes of this AU, the mutant school draws most inspiration from what I gleaned from the first two X-Men films (including its name), but the cast of characters and their backgrounds are less movie-based in many cases. Most notably not-movie-based are probably going to be Nightcrawler and Gambit.

**Chapter 1**

**A Harebrained Idea**

 

“I do not know the full extent of it,” Steve Rogers said.

He had come to Charles Xavier’s school in the capacity of Captain America, but it was Steve Rogers speaking, there was no doubt of it. There was no doubt of it in the man’s mind, and he offered his mind for consideration with relative, but still astonishing calm.

“I do not know what exactly had happened to him before he came here,” he continued. “And I do not intend to claim none of what he did was Loki’s fault. But Thor is convinced there is someone else behind what happened in New York. And we are... we are worried because Odin does not seem to have taken that into consideration. Does not seem to have paid attention to...”

Here he stopped, deciding that he could not put into words the images before his mind’s eye quickly enough and eloquently enough. He continued without words. Starved alley cats. People around campfires under the bridge. A man tied down to an operation table. Loki handcuffed to a bedpost. They all had the same haggard look to them.

“Because he was hungry?” Charles Xavier asked and raised his eyebrows at the Captain in bemusement.

“Because he was starved,” Steve took the plunge. “Because he was screaming to be heard and too proud to admit it. And I had been too stupid, too well-trained not to ask once before, and that was a friend. I did it again this time, and I don’t want to let it end on that note again.”

It was quite astonishing. Some time ago (it was still fresh for him), Steve had unwittingly let down a friend who’d been through hell; he could not have known at the time, no one knew anything useful about that sort of thing at that time. Now it was gnawing at his conscience, and he reacted by wanting to help an enemy?

Charles did not mind that part as much as what the actual proposition was.

“And what if it backfires?” he asked. “You are asking much of me. This is a school.” It all seemed too naïve for his liking.

“But it would not be the first time it’s backfired, would it?” the Captain retorted, and suddenly he was not naïve at all.

Against his will, Xavier was impressed. A man who could lay his mind down before him like an open book and still hide an aspect of his personality was special; now he finally began to understand why exactly Captain America had become the icon he was.

He still did not like the idea, though, and did not like the direction the conversation seemed to be heading. Despite his continuing efforts for integration, he still stood on the Mutants’ side first.

“I think you can expect Director Fury to come and discuss this further with you,” Steve rose from the chair he had been sitting in. “He is going to press that last line further, no doubt. Point out that S.H.I.E.L.D.’s been keeping interested folks off your case so far. I don’t want to use that leverage; pressuring you into this would be counterproductive. I wanted to try and help you see my point of view. Mine and Thor’s.”

“And no one else’s, by the look of things, “Xavier remarked.

“I also spoke to a priest.”

“About _Loki_?”

“Not by name,” Steve admitted.

“The sort of insight and help a priest can offer is only going to work if the person in question is willing,” Xavier remarked. “I do not think that is the case here.”

“That is where you might be able to help,” Steve nodded. “Because you can gain insights none of us can.”

“If I am going to do this,” Xavier said, “I will require full cooperation from your side. And by that, I mean full acknowledgement of the fact that this is, first and foremost, a school. For young people. Who deserve to live their lives as normally as possible in the circumstances.”

“Of course,” Steve said. “Thor says there are ways the Asgardians can make that work. Technically, it should not be any significantly different from the time he was on Earth as a human.”

He shrugged and both the gesture and his mind sent the signal “we’ll have to take them by their word on that.”

The door to the study opened and in peeked Logan. He was wearing his leather jacket and still pulling a glove from his hand: he’d just come back from his summer roamings, had just parked his bike in the garage.

“Huh,” he said by way of greeting, staring at the Captain, who was staring back. There was recognition in the Captain’s mind. There was an image in Steve’s memory: Logan in 1940s-era uniform of the Canadian Army.

Wolverine, on the other hand, was staring just because it was Captain America sitting in Charles’ guest chair.

Charles sighed.

“Logan, what did I tell you about knocking?”

“The last time? That if I can’t knock softly, I shouldn’t bother,” Wolverine informed him with a triumphant grin.

“Howlett?” Steve asked incredulously.

“Huh?” Logan did again, looking as idiotic as he ever could. Charles knew him better by now, of course, knew that Wolverine’s mind simply reacted in different ways, but even for him it was sometimes hard to get over appearances.

Steve shook his head.

“Sorry. I must have mistaken you for someone.”

Wolverine’s face and tongue finally caught up with his mind.

“Maybe not,” he said. “You see, I lost my memory a while back. Who’s this Howlett you’re speaking of?”

 

* * *

 

That end-of-summer teachers’ conference started out quite well. They covered all the usual topics and a few of the less usual ones that always arose in a school like theirs, such as “Logan, I hope I can still count on you with the new drama club?” (The answer was, surprisingly, not the resigned groan Scott had expected, but rather a simple, almost eager nod.)

It was the news Xavier broke at the end that turned everything upside down: one of their new students...

One of their new students was none other than Loki, the very same Loki who had wrought destruction on New York City a while back. The very same Loki whose destruction the X-Men had helped clear away. The very same Loki who had...

His magic, Xavier explained, would be bound, and he would be a teenager in everything but experience. It was an arrangement he had made with Director Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Odin himself, in an effort to help discover the real cause behind Loki’s actions. And an effort to stop him from ever committing similar actions. They would have to be careful around him, yes, but Xavier stressed that he wished for them to not appear more paranoid than they would normally be; not just for Loki’s sake, but also for that of the other students.

“I want you to treat him like any other student.”

It was, of course, Logan, who said aloud what everyone was thinking, most of them very carefully. Logan had no such compunctions around the Professor, and this time, Scott conceded unwillingly, it may be for the best.

“You can’t be serious. You can’t expect us to.”

The Professor reasoned with them. It boiled down to the fact that there was some sort of psychological damage in Loki no one else was sure about and only he (and maybe Jean) could discover with certainty.

“You can’t expect us to,” Logan repeated. “It’s a harebrained idea.”

It wasn’t, Scott reflected, that he would be afraid of what Loki could do. Logan’s mind did not work that way, did it? He just simply could not see himself treating someone like that like any other student.

None of them could. But now that he thought about it, he was not sure Logan meant it the way the rest of them did.

 

* * *

 

Odin paced through the chamber, impatient for the return of Thor. Frigga and Heimdall waited more patiently, but they, too, wished for the prince’s speedy arrival. In recent days, Heimdall had sent many reports about Midgard, and in light of what they were planning, the news were worrying.

“It is deceit,” Odin said. “The Captain is not dead. Why would Fury keep it from them?”

“Because it is better if it is believed,” Frigga offered. “There is poison in the very fabric of their government, and to cut it out, the Captain has to move unseen.”

Odin sighed.

“His fellow warriors should know,” he said.

Fury is making the same mistake we made once, Frigga thought. Sometimes, it is easier to keep things the way they are, even from those who deserve to know.

“And now,” Odin continued, “that we have arrived at this agreement about Loki, having the Captain gone is most inconvenient. Thor must know.”

Everything in his countenance suggested he still thought this agreement about Loki unwise. He was not alone. Director Fury did not like it, either. The Avengers did not like it. The man who had agreed to keep Loki in his charge, Professor Charles Xavier, did not really like it. The only people who had seen merit in the arrangement were Thor and the Captain, who had proposed it.

And later on, Frigga. It was her voice that had, in the end, convinced Odin, with much reluctance on his part.

“It was you herself who told me to pay attention to Midgard’s stories,” he had said. “And now you want me to send him there? Where he had rained destruction? Where they had feared him long before we realised his treachery ourselves? You have always said that stories have power, that I should pay heed to them. I should have paid heed to them and kept him in a prison worse than the one he is in now.”

It was precisely these thoughts entering his head, Frigga realised, that Thor and the Captain had feared. It was the fear of these thoughts that had brought the other idea into their minds.

“It worked for Thor,” she reminded her husband only.

“There were no such stories about Thor, and his transgression was smaller.”

But it was a transgression. And oh, there _were_ stories. Many stories. When exactly did Odin start paying attention only to some of them?

When he started fearing the child he had brought home. Frigga was not sure when it had happened. Maybe it had only happened after Loki had fallen.

But there were other stories. There were stories of Loki being helpful. There were stories of Thor’s rage. And there were stories...

There was one particular story Thor had told her; a different story. Not a story of Asgard. A story of sacrifice and redemption.

“And they believe it?” she had asked.

“The Captain believes it,” Thor had replied, and that was enough; enough to tell her that to a certain degree, so did her elder son.

All stories had power. Sometimes, you had to lay your faith in a particular one and hope against hope that its power was greater.

 

* * *

 

It was a harebrained idea, and Loki would enjoy it immensely.

Because it had worked out so well for Thor, obviously (even though the big brute was apparently arguing with his father even more now, so Loki wondered what exactly the good of it had been), Odin had decided, in the end, that sending Loki into exile on Midgard was the best solution to the question of an unwanted, rebellious, world-conquering jötunn step-son.

It was a harebrained idea and Loki would enjoy it immensely. Or so he had thought. At any rate, anything would be better than the boredom of his comfortable but completely isolated prison in Asgard’s dungeons, with the inability to tap into the magic of the place not only binding him in place but also feeding that boredom. Or so he had thought.

He would, of course, still be stripped of the use of most of his magic. That much was clear to him from the start. These things were usually done with restrictive collars if you wanted the prisoners to move about. But when the guards finally came for him, the restrictive collar they put on him was... not what he had expected. Not really a collar. It was a necklace of stone beads, black interspersed with colour, and Loki began to feel much of his anticipation and amusement seep off.

This was not just an enforced ban. He knew the configuration, if nothing else about its workings in truth. This was a complete stripping of his attunement to magic. It was not simply a case of being unable to use it; it was a case of being unable to feel it. He would be – as one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel had been fond of saying – a _sitting duck_ to anyone wishing to take advantage of him, and to a large part of more natural occurrences as well. He would have to change his thinking completely, learn to be aware in different ways.

He still had some cards up his sleeve, even though at this point, it was no longer a set of throwing knives. He could talk his way out of many situations. He could plan and scheme. And even though he had never been such a big golden warrior like Thor, he was still stronger than humans and he could still fight, and fight dirty at that. It was a card he would happily save for the weaklings on Midgard: it would be quite enough if – when – the need arose.

When the closure of the necklace snapped together with a finite dull sound behind his ears, he found out, to his surprise, that he must possess some intrinsic affinity to magic so deep down in himself that not even the necklace could reach it. He had feared he would turn into the blue monster. He did not.

But the whispers of magic all around him, as he had been used to them from a young age, were truly gone. And that hurt even more than being stripped of his ability to tap into them had. As they led him through the corridors, he felt like being led blindfolded.

It was not to be the end of his humiliations.

 

* * *

 

“It’s a stupid idea,” Iron Man said, as if it could change anything now.

Carol sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. Oh how she wished for Steve to be here. She wondered what was more annoying, Steve faking his death and taking off on his own, letting them hang for a while, or Fury going along with it and letting them hang much longer than Steve probably would have let them had it been up to him. The fact that the Avengers, in the person of Thor, had to be told by _Odin_ , and the fact that Steve was now somewhere out there apparently working with _the Punisher_ of all people, only added insult to injury.

It probably would not be so bad if it were not right now that they were asked to deliver Loki from S.H.I.E.L.D. to Westchester to the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, where Fury and Thor had negotiated for him to stay. It would be better if Steve were here, because he got along with Xavier much better. He never let the fact that the Professor could read minds get between them leading a civil conversation – that was just how Steve was. Carol wasn’t wired that way. She was, usually, much more easy-going around people than Steve, but on certain occasions, that lack of reserve also meant she was much quicker to blow. Normally, the two of them leading the Avengers together was what worked best.

At least she had negotiated, on the pretence of helping to keep up appearances, that it would only be Thor, as Loki’s brother, who would go with him all the way to Xavier’s, on the same day many of the other students were expected to arrive.

It meant Loki would stay with the Avengers longer. It was a necessary evil. If he were to live on Earth, he had to get a crash course. And if he were to get a crash course, he’d better get it from someone who knew where he was coming from.

She was still not sure how she was going to keep Clint from trying to tear Loki’s head off during that time.


End file.
